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Insulation

Do you ever find that no matter how much you love your friends, and no matter how much you’ve been through together, and even if they know you super well, do you find that there still remains this wall or glass or fence or basically some solid barrier between you and them? This is why John Durham Peters says we communicate: the act of communication is but an act of reconciling self and other. But sometimes you wonder if this barrier is even a bad thing. Or at least, I wonder.

I’ve never felt very different from others in life as a child; I’ve always just kinda had my own circle and things made sense within that circle and that was fine. But the older I get, the more I feel like I become distilled into who I really am – most of the extra stuff just got scraped away and I got sharpened into who I really really am – the more different I feel from everyone else. I think differently, I care differently, I build my world differently. (Maybe this acute sense of difference was felt more and more strongly and led to the existence of old and ex friends.)

Most days, it’s an ok condition. I’ve been accused a few times of being in my own world. And I generally like it. But sometimes the sense of isolation is too much. And it’s not really as easy as reaching out and trying to touch someone via a text message. The talking about nothing is the worst, actually. You know what the funny thing is? The more isolated I feel, the more I wish to be in isolation.